I should have added ONLY to the sentence you quote -- but I think it might have been interpolated from context.
Bottom line -- I'm asking people to build a library of long term strategies activists can borrow from, a menu of long term strategies activist can choose from. As an experience activist who has started working with experience acitivists, I think most activists are too involved in day to day work to come up with good long term plans. The thought occurred to me that this is one area where the type of intellectual who is concerned with Marxism and PoMo might make a useful contribution, and where for the most part you aren't currrently. If this is not the kind of thing Marxist or Feminist or Green or Progressive intellectuals do, then I apologize for wasting your time. I sort of thought this was something you folks might be both willing and able to do.
P.S. to Yoshie -- I am not pretending that activists don't have social theories -- the best of us conciously theorize.. . But I doubt we are as good at theory as someone who does it full time. I don't know why asking for a practical suggestion is taken as an attack on theorists. I didn't know the assumption you were capable of such was an insult.
I'm not in the non-profit field. I work for a living and do activisim in my spare time. Because I don't sleep much I even have more time for theory than many paid activists. But I'm hoping that full time journalists and academicians have time and perspective and backround to take a longer term view than I have and come up with useful long terms plans. If you can't come up with a plan for winning a revolution, how about a plan for winning single payer health, or winning a more progressive income tax than our current one? If revolution is too big, and single payer health is too small then you pick the goal that is appropriate to your skills and interests. . But dammit, if you think for a living then you ought to be able to come up with some suggestions as to how to win something. Carrol Cox wrote:
> Gar writes:
>
> > Who says you have to construct from first principles? By all means use
> facts.
>
> Gar, I hope this sentence is an accident, which you don't actually believe
> yourself, because if you do mean it I'm not sure whether it's possible to
> hold a conversation with you. To say this is tantamount to saying that
> facts explain themselves. Not only do they not explain themselves, they do
> not even exist "in themselves," and while "Just the facts, Maam" may be
> both good TV and good "common sense," please note (for example) that
> asserting the fact that "A murdered B" presupposes an elaborate social
> theory which is the result of millenia of action and thought. We can still
> have very real debates about whether the "fact" (returned to below) that
> "A killed B" necessarily has any connection with the "fact" that "A
> murdered B."
>
> And neither is the proposition, "A killed B," in any simple sense a
> "fact," for "to kill" is a *relationship*, not an "observable event," and
> it is in fact fundamental to modern thought, both idealist *and*
> historical materialist, that relations cannot be observed but must be
> thought (see the *Grundrisse*, but one need not be a Marxist to recognize
> the truth of this). So the assertion of "A killed B" implies a set of
> principles in terms of which the relationship "killed" can be *thought*.
> No principles, no facts.
>
> You ARE whether you know it or not acting from principles. The only
> question is how conscious you are of the principles you are operating
> from. Unless you acknowledge to yourself what those principles are, and
> make those principles clear to others in your posts, we do not share any
> foundation which makes us mutually intelligible.
>
> Now under *all* historical conditions and contexts, the principles which
> one adheres to blindly, without critique, are the principles of "common
> sense," i.e., the principles which make intelligible the class relations
> of that given social order, and in terms of which one *cannot*, however
> much one wishes to, do other than reaffirm in various forms the principles
> of the ruling class(es) of that social order.
>
> So Gar, what *are* the principles in terms of which you arrive at your
> views of the relationship (actually an internal relationship) of practice
> and thought. It seems to me that you make thought the ultimate reality,
> and practice a merely subordinate actuality which flows from thought.
> Thought "invents" activism, and then more thought says that "activism" is
> the way to reconcile the endless confusions which thought, separated from
> practice, generates for itself.
>
> Carrol Cox